


In This Distance

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Blow Jobs, Comfort Sex, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Psychological Trauma, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-09
Updated: 2012-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-30 20:33:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Audrey Horne doesn't believe in ghosts, except for the one that lives in Dale Cooper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In This Distance

**Author's Note:**

> Once again for Porn Battle XIII, for the entirely appropriate prompts "lips, spooky".

There are no such things as ghosts. 

Spooks, demons, secret portals to a dimension of pure evil; those things Audrey Horne can believe in some abstract manner, safely removed from them. There may be heaven and hell, whatever names are given to those places, and Twin Peaks may be the center of it all. Audrey prefers the hard reality around her, the things she can grip in her hands and take to pieces and understand. Ghosts are the very opposite of that which she likes; intangible and unknowable things, just beyond explanation, so she refuses to grant them her time or her thoughts or anything that resembles believing that they’re real. 

And yet.

And yet there is a ghost in Dale Cooper, or perhaps he is the ghost now. Most of the time, he is as he has always been since Audrey met him: brilliant and sharp-witted and dangerously ignorant of sensible things she takes for granted. Other times, if the wind blows the right way or a shadow crosses his path at a certain angle, Coop is something else, some shaded whisper of himself. 

She is patient with him, smiles and chats about the family business with him when they eat dinner together every time he comes through town, at least once a month these days, more often if he can manage it. Audrey flirts with her toes pressed into his calves beneath the table, tries it all, everything she can imagine to keep that darkness at bay when it creeps like fog over the pines around the Great Northern. Most of the time these days, it works, he snaps back to reality with a smile that falters at the edges and answers her with some strange kind of logic that she only half-follows. His bizarrely insular reasoning might never make sense anywhere but in Twin Peaks. Audrey wonders how he ever even managed to pass himself off in the world beyond this town that has been all she knows. 

Some days, her patient, outstretched hand isn’t enough to save Coop from himself; from the ghost that lives inside him and occasionally possesses him, makes him distant and afraid of the concentrated light in the corners of a room, or the falling twilight outside his windows; keeps him awake and silent and haunted for days.

Audrey thinks of the night that nearly lost him his position in the FBI, not the night he wore the suit and the glasses and played the high-rolling gambler with fingers in the Twin Peaks drug trade. The other night, the night he found her in that horrible brothel and rescued her, bearing her weight on his shoulders like some ridiculous white knight. She thinks too of what came next, pajamas and chocolate malteds and french fries late into the night on his bed, and how badly she had wanted to kiss him then. Those memories are welcome, but mostly Audrey thinks how she had felt upon waking and remembering that Coop had rescued her, how she had wanted to prove herself, to shake up the norm in his world and rescue _him_.

Now Audrey has her chance to do so, not as she had expected, with a gun strapped under a skirt or witty negotiation with some scheming drug lord. She is no longer so naive as to think that her idle fantasies are the only way she could ever rescue her dear Agent Cooper, not when there are darker things in the world than the shallow villainy of the Renault brothers. Evil is something Audrey can believe in. Not the superstitious rumors of the forest, but the darkness in a person that can grow and consume, so much that she remains vigilantly aware of the deepest parts of herself, lest they ever rise up and see the light of day. The thing that was in Leland Palmer, the same thing that took Coop for a time before the town found him, brought most of him back, Audrey doesn’t know what to call that. She doesn’t try. There’s no point now it’s gone. 

This visit is Coop’s second this month, though it’s only just the start of the third week in October. Audrey comes to the door of the room he stays in every time, the same one he stayed in the first time he arrived in Twin Peaks. Coop talks cheerfully over dinner about how he’s finally planning to buy the house he’ll retire to in about twenty or thirty years, or whenever he’s too tired of the FBI and dealing with “Beltway bullshit” (Albert’s term, not his, Coop clarifies with an apologetic grin, just over the rim of his wineglass). Audrey tells him about her father’s run for Senate, laughs at his opponent’s attack ads, and looks at Coop as coyly as she can when she sips from her glass. Audrey is a direct sort of woman, she doesn’t like fooling around with flirty mind games. 

She could let this go on, flirting and never getting anywhere; chatting and avoiding Coop’s ghost, but she has no desire to keep pretending. His eyes are drawn somewhere near the edge of the room. Audrey leans over the small table and grasps his hand and they fly upward, return to her and to reality, and his momentary surprise is quickly covered by a forced smile.

He asks her in that maddening, evasive way of his, “What are you doing, Audrey?”, dodging the point spectacularly, as if he doesn’t already know what it is she’s trying to do; what it is she wants. Once, what feels like an age before, he told her that what he wanted was very different than what he should do, or something like that, but Audrey is not the subject of one of his investigations anymore. She _is_ a woman, and she knows what it is she wants for herself. Fortunately, she already knows that he wants this, too.

So she rests her elbow on the table and her chin on her fist and smiles as sweetly as she knows how. “Seducing you, Agent Cooper,” she says, and hides her laugh behind her hand when color floods his cheeks.

Within minutes, she has him upstairs and in his room again, and though Coop looks around the room with some hesitation, Audrey closes the door behind her and sashays toward him with her hips circling wide. The moon is nothing more than a sliver in the sky, the stars seem so distant and cold, and the shadows in the pines in Twin Peaks are dark. Coop’s eyes are drawn to the corners of the room, to the shadows carried by the gusting wind until Audrey wraps her hand in his tie and tugs gently for his attention. 

‘You really mean to do this,’ the Coop in her head would say, but the one in front of her is silent and still, slipping away before her eyes. ‘Live,’ she wants to tell him, ‘remember that you’re still alive, there’s so much waiting for you to wake up from this.’ Audrey keeps as quiet as he does, though, says it all with a prolonged stare that Coop fights to hold. Then, without preamble, she unzips his perfectly starched black trousers and reaches inside. 

It isn’t very surprising to find he’s the slightest bit hard when her fingers curl around him and stroke deftly upward. Audrey has given a lot of thought to the theory of this, spent some time in private to practice, and all for this. Whatever amount of good it does for him, it will be worth the time she’s given to practice and she will be grateful. Coop’s eyes are distant and faintly glazed, but his hands grip the windowsill so hard that his knuckles go bone-white, as if he’s fighting some force that might pull him away if he lets go. Audrey is clumsy with her mouth and knocks her jaw against his, smiles soothingly and tries again, kissing him in earnest until his mouth softens with a quiet, gasping intake of air. 

When she goes to her knees in front of him, flashing a smile so quick that he won’t be able to see the nerves she’s covering for, Audrey centers her thoughts on Coop as he was; Coop as he should be. When a stray kiss lands on the shaft of his cock, he pulls a hand from the window ledge and smoothes her hair back from her face. 

“Audrey,” he begins to say, and she can hear the rest of it in her head: ‘This really isn’t appropriate,’ or ‘You don’t know what you want’. Instead, his fingertips press into her scalp and she hears the faint thump of the back of his head against the glass pane when her lips push down past the glans of his cock. 

“You don’t have to do this,” is what he finally grits out, and she can just imagine his fingers sliding on the unvarnished wood, his mouth tight, his usually kempt hair falling down over his eyes. 

Rather than indulge herself in seeing him come undone, Audrey keeps her eyes closed and her mind on the task at hand. Literally at hand, she thinks, and her lips twitch with a smile she can’t quite form. She twists her palm around the base of his cock, bumps her wrist against the dark, wiry curls there and squeezes her eyes closed tighter when it bumps the bottom edge of his Kevlar vest. Nothing good has come to Dale Cooper since arriving in Twin Peaks over a year before, and Audrey wonders what it is that brings him back so often. There must be homes for his retirement elsewhere in the country, even in the state. Places closer to what family he has, closer to his job, farther from bitter memories or ghosts, or whatever it is that hurt Coop before and keeps hurting him now. 

She catches herself before her mind wanders too far and redoubles her efforts, exploring the contour of him with her tongue. There’s a salty taste she had forgotten to expect, and a concentration of his scent in her nostrils; his cologne and that unique, warm smell like pine and musk and paper she associates with only him. It takes some experimentation before she finds the precise combination and rhythm of movement that pulls out the stuttering gasp and tightened grip she’s aimed for, but once Audrey finds it, she doesn’t relent. Coop finally releases the window ledge entirely, cups her cheek with the newly-freed hand and traces the curving bone of her jaw up to her ear, circles the sensitive cartilage and then retreats across her cheekbones. It’s a simple circuit of touch, but so affectionate that Audrey is finally certain that she’s done the right thing, that she’s reached farther into the abyss than before and dragged him back. 

His sharp, half-whimpered gasp is what alerts her to his impending climax, though Audrey also feels him swell the instant afterward, and she flattens her tongue to the underside of his cock. Coop gives an entirely unexpected shout and Audrey manages to swallow twice before she coughs and presses her cheek into his clothed thigh, wrapping her arms around his legs and catching her breath. She’s faintly aware of his thumbs wiping her cheek clean and is irrationally charmed by the streak of white he smears onto his otherwise perfect trousers, the tenderness with which he treats her while recovering himself.

When Audrey dares to look up again, his eyes are clear and bright, almost abashed at the enthusiasm with which he gave himself. If he suspects why she did this, and Audrey is certain he’s sharp enough to know, then he’s too polite to say anything about her white-knight syndrome. Coop brushes back her dark hair, tangles a few strands around his fingers, and looks at her with such honest fondness that her heart turns over in her chest. It’s not enough to exorcise that ghost, not quite, but it’s a start in the right direction and that’s enough for Audrey if it’s enough for him; if she’ll be allowed to see it through to the end with him.

“You’ll stay the night, won’t you?” Coop helps her to her feet and even tries to straighten her hair where his hands have pushed it out of place. Audrey wonders if he’s going to offer her a chocolate malted and a sympathetic ear again, but instead he dusts invisible dust from her blouse. 

“As long as I get to work on time,” she grins, reaches up and stills his hands, tries to look serious. “You _won’t_ keep me up too late, will you, Agent Cooper?”

“No,” he promises, and his fingertips trace fire down the back side of her arms. “I’ll see that you’re at your desk on time myself.”

Audrey can hardly keep herself from laughing at how silly they both sound, how glad she is to have won back this piece of him; how much she looks forward to winning back the rest. “Very good,” she says with coy heat while drawing him closer to the bed, “because it’s my turn now.”

Coop follows obediently, doesn’t argue, and she can hardly blame him.


End file.
